The Evolution of the German Tort Law in the 19th Century - An Economic Analysis of the Evolution of Law

Contents:

Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this paper tries to contribute to our understanding of the process of institutional innovations. It is shown that the decisive factors that explain legal change are (1) the cognitive creativity of the actors and (2) wealth effects caused by negative technological externalities, which result from the use of new technologies. The main focus is on the evolution of the German tort law in the 19th century beginning with the introduction of the strict liability rule for railway accidents by the Prussian Railway Law in 1838. This was a complete break with the whole German tradition of tort law which was firmly based for centuries on the negligence rule. This case study shows how the co-evolution of technical and legal changes triggered off a trial-and-error-process of legal innovations and imitations that resulted in the present-day broad diffusion of the liability rule in the German tort law.

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:roswps:23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (ZBW - German National Library of Economics)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.